Pokémon card condition guide: NM, LP, MP, HP and Damaged

Five conditions decide what a raw card sells for: Near Mint, Lightly Played, Moderately Played, Heavily Played and Damaged. TCGplayer sets those definitions and its listings set the prices most other sites quote, so this is the scale worth learning. Mint and Gem Mint are not sold there at all — those words belong to graded cards.

This page covers raw cards only. If your card is already in a sealed holder with a number on the label, you are reading the wrong scale: skip to how grading numbers work.

The five conditions and what each one allows#

The condition of a card is set by the number and severity of its imperfections, not by an overall impression. Wear from play, handling and storage counts, and so do printing and manufacturing defects.

The line most listings get wrong sits between MP and HP. Bends, peels and liquid exposure are acceptable at Moderately Played only while they do not affect the structural integrity of the card. Once they do, the card is not one tier down — it is Damaged.

What Moderately Played actually looks like#

Moderately Played is the honest home of a card that lived in a binder for a decade. Expect visible edge whitening on all four sides, a dull spot or two where the gloss has rubbed off, fine scratches you see when you tilt the card into the light, and possibly one bend that has creased. None of those, on their own, drop it further.

A card sits at the tier set by its worst flaw, not by the average of its flaws.

That rule is why sellers who describe a card as Lightly Played “apart from one crease” get returns. The crease is the condition — and a return costs the marketplace fee twice.

The three tests that decide Damaged#

TCGplayer names three aspects of a card’s integrity, and this is the most useful part of the whole standard because it converts a judgement call into three yes-or-no questions.

Fail any one of the three and the card is Damaged regardless of how the rest of it looks.

Defects that skip every tier and land on Damaged#

Two categories jump straight to the floor. Certain manufacturing defects — crimping, significant miscuts or shifting — make a card Damaged no matter how perfect its corners are. So do alterations: stamps, signatures, paint and marker. A signed card is Damaged on the marketplace even when the signature is what makes it valuable to you.

This is worth knowing before you sell rather than after — and it is why most misprints sell below a clean copy rather than above it. A miscut Near Mint card is not an NM listing with a note; it is either a Damaged listing or a photo listing that shows the defect and names the condition the card would otherwise have.

Checking a card in about a minute#

1. Step 1

   One light, one angle

   Hold the card under a single light source and tilt it. Surface scratches and lost gloss are invisible under flat overhead light and obvious at an angle.

2. Step 2

   Edges before corners

   Run your eye along all four edges for whitening, then check the four corners for fraying or softness. Edge whitening is the most common reason a card is not Near Mint.

3. Step 3

   Back, then front

   Flip it. Backs collect more wear than fronts and buyers photograph both. Wax stains and scuffs on the back count.

4. Step 4

   Bend test by sight, not by hand

   Look down the length of the card for a bend, and look for the white line that says the bend has creased. Do not flex the card to find out.

5. Step 5

   Take the lowest tier

   Whatever the worst single flaw allows, that is the condition. Write it down with the flaw next to it — that sentence is your listing description.

Marketplace condition is not a grading company’s number#

These are two different scales and mixing them costs money in both directions. A marketplace condition describes a raw card you can hold; a grading number describes a card sealed in a holder by a company that also charges you for the service.

The gap is sharpest on centering, which the marketplace scale does not mention at all. PSA requires centering within approximately 55/45 on the front and 75/25 on the reverse for a Gem Mint 10, tightening to 60/40 front and 90/10 reverse for a Mint 9 (PSA grading standards, read 2026-08-21). A card can be flawless by every TCGplayer criterion and still cap at a 7 because the border is wider on the left than on the right — see the centering calculator for what your card measures.

When condition matters least#

On a bulk common, condition is close to irrelevant — the card is worth its bulk rate whether it is NM or HP, and sorting it carefully costs more time than it returns. Condition compounds with scarcity: it decides most of the price on a vintage holo, some of the price on a modern chase card, and none of the price on a card that thousands of people have in a shoebox.

That is also the practical filter for what to check by hand. Work out what drives the value of your card first, then spend the minute on condition only for the cards where the answer was “quite a lot”. Once a card has a condition worth protecting, how you store it is the only thing that keeps it there.

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